


the pull of loyalty

by bastaerd



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: (sort of), Gen, Grief, Guilt, Illnesses, Implied Relationships, Missing Scene, Pillow Talk, episode 10- we are gone, mutual disgust
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-22
Updated: 2021-01-22
Packaged: 2021-03-14 03:22:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28913799
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bastaerd/pseuds/bastaerd
Summary: “Well,” says Henry sometime, “here we are. This is where the expedition ends, Edward.”
Comments: 22
Kudos: 34
Collections: The Terror Bingo





	the pull of loyalty

**Author's Note:**

> for the [terrorbingo](https://theterrorbingo.tumblr.com/) prompt **_sharing a bed._**

They had left behind ten men on Terror when they walked out. Most think them dead by now, and few go so far as to hold out the hope that they were still alive, but that is not to say much, since their own numbers dwindled first by the day, and then by the hour. Still, the men think of them, keep their names with them like those of the dead and wonder if they are yet with them or if they are still living aboard the ship, with their English blankets and English coal and English regrets. That seems to be the single provision Sir John had not skimped on.

They have not yet abandoned their tents. The few times they have stopped to erect their camp, they have put them up, as well as the mangled remains of the flag, and are too exhausted to find any resemblance between it and the tatters of their group. It is all they can do to keep their head up and their eyes open, and even then, can often only manage one of those at a time. The thing about dead men walking is that they have lost the wherewithal to realize that they are dead. They have not made much progress in the way of distance, but every step feels like a mile on bones which grate together, stomachs that twist and growl like dogs, mouths that bleed. When they build their tents, they lean their scavenged posts against each other in whatever way keeps them standing, drape canvas over them and hold it down with rocks, with tins, with Bibles all bleached from exposure. Later, with bones picked white and dry.

Edward and Henry are the last remnants of Terror and Erebus, respectively, and possibly the last survivors of the expedition. If they are not yet, they both know they soon will be. Survival means little to the both of them now, as their supply of food dwindles, as their exhaustion grows to swallow whatever strength they are able to scrape together in a day. They lay-- lie-- huddled together under an overhang of canvas that lets the wind blow through as if to strip the meat from them. Neither of them can provide much warmth to the other, nor any shelter from the elements, as depleted as they are, but still, they cling to each other, hands fisted in the other’s lapels and faces scant centimeters away, locked together as if in rigor mortis. Every breath is cold and rattles the watch chains strung through the thin skin of their faces.

Henry is awake. His eyes are open wide, yellowed where they should be white and shot through with bright red blood vessels. His breath smells of metal and spoiled meat and infection where the hollow graves of missing teeth have bled and festered. The dense brush of his beard scrapes Edward’s cheek and catches in the links of his chain, but cannot pull at them hard enough to lift his head for him.

“Well,” says Henry sometime, “here we are. This is where the expedition ends, Edward.”

The sun no longer sets, because of the time of year and their latitude. Sometimes Edward thinks that it has all been just one long day; the captain was taken in the morning, and they will have him back and the mutineers apprehended before supper. Hours mean little across nearly a thousand miles, and those miles mean nothing if they cannot walk them. They have been ill for far longer than he has allowed himself to admit, and the anger which seizes him is not entirely his own.

“You forget the captain,” he says through a clenched jaw. “He may still be alive. We might be with him now, if you had allowed us to go back for him.”

Henry blinks. It is an eerie thing to watch as he does so. “None of us stopped you,” he reminds him.

“Nor did you spare any men to help. I could not have stood a chance of it by myself.” Not as one man with one rifle. Even a marine might have made some difference, if only to appeal to Tozer and Pilkington, who had gone with Hickey’s band. On the other hand, Tozer’s presence might have turned the private against him and brought them both to the mutineers’ side as convert and hostage. “If I had gone out on my own, I would have failed,” Edward admits. The hypothetical is more palatable an admission than the fact that he has failed his captain anyway.

He feels Henry’s eyes on his face, regarding him coolly. “You failed your captain,” he says, as if having read Edward’s mind, “just as Crozier failed mine.” There is something hard behind his eyes. It reminds Edward of the shale, of trying to dig a hole six feet deep in bedrock.

They had buried Fitzjames out in the persistent daylight, the few remaining men who could still hold a shovel clearing jagged rocks to create a grave for him. He never saw who it was that had wrapped him up in the cloth of an old tent, but saw Henry’s fingertip bleed. He himself had not taken part in the burial; he had been beside the captain, feeling like he had missed something important and crucial to his understanding of Crozier’s grief. The conversation shifted too quickly to strategy and how to elude the creature. How to continue surviving, after burying the second of Erebus’ captains.

Crozier told Edward that he had said a service with Fitzjames, privately. He imagines it had been in the tent in which Fitzjames died, and that it was not so late after the fact that the body would have cooled.

Henry’s hands bear calluses on the palms from digging.

“It’s difficult to stomach, isn’t it?” Henry is asking, his breath soft against Edward’s cheek and smelling of rotten things. “Not death. Not doom. Failure. It turns life into something unbearable and inescapable, all at the same time. It makes cowards out of men who want to be brave.”

“No,” Edward grits out. His fists clench in the wool of Henry’s waistcoat as they both shiver. “You stopped me from rescuing the captain. You may have killed us all.”

“I never stopped you,” says Henry, showing the grey of his gums, though he is not smiling. The thing his mouth does is something other than a smile. “You were free to do what you wished. No one held you at gunpoint and forced you to follow us. You chose to come along.”

“Had I not, I would have died!”

As soon as he says it, Edward snaps his mouth shut, clipping his tongue. He cannot tell if the tang in his mouth is from that, or if it is the same one that he has grown used to. Henry’s grip on him shifts; he takes a knobby hand and traces the chain from Edward’s lip to his ear, and holds the tail of it. 

“We’re no better than the ones who’ve gone before us,” he says quietly. “Crozier did not let us go on for help when there was still a chance for it to be of any use, and look at us now.”

The implication that Crozier does not deserve a rescue party when he himself had made the decision not to bring back rescue for the ill goes unsaid, but still hangs there between them like cold sweat and stale breath. “We would have ended up the same as we are now,” Edward replies, as if by rote rather than by his own conviction. “It would have saved no one. We would have only left the ill to die thinking themselves abandoned.”

Henry’s mouth twists. “Did our ill not think themselves abandoned when you left them?” he asks.

Edward’s own words come back to him like bile. How selfish he had been, to leave because he could still leave, because he was not yet confined to a tent, unable to haul or travel. Still, he summons what little courage he has not yet given up, swallows his self-doubt to speak. “You left me no choice but to follow,” he insists. The hand on the chain tightens; he can feel his head tipping upwards minutely. “You could have ordered some of the men to stay; we could have each taken a marine, and-”

“None of them wanted to stay,” says Henry. “We held a vote. We might have died either way, but walking towards rescue, even never to reach it, is better than waiting for a rescue party that does not even know there are men to rescue.”

“Are you not a lieutenant?” Edward hisses. Henry holds his gaze steadily, his eyes cold and glinting like brass buttons. Edward must look as crazed as he does, but for all his madness, there is no trace of a madman in Henry’s countenance. “Are you not a man? Is it not better to give comfort to the dying than to abandon them for reasons they lack the capacity to understand?”

“Do not speak to me of comforting the dying.” Henry gives the chain a sharp tug that pulls on Edward’s earlobe in a way that might have caused him pain, had he any feeling there. “There is no comfort to offer a corpse. James was robbed of any comfort I had to offer him as he lay dying. I sewed his body into an old tent and could not remember a single prayer for him; I sang him drinking songs.” Another pull, angling Edward’s head so that he looks up over the crown of Henry’s head. “Don’t speak to me of comfort when you fled from your duty to dispense it.”

The wind whips through the tent, sending the poles creaking and the canvas flapping about them. For a moment it sounds like voices, but then again, many things sound like voices calling over the land from across a long distance. It never sounds like rescue-- only those left behind, returned to haunt them. They call him  _ Lieutenant _ and  _ Edward _ and, infrequently enough that the surprise is tantalizingly welcome,  _ Ned,  _ but they are gone. Edward carries them in his guilt.

Slowly, Henry’s grip slackens. His hand falls from the chain, catches itself against the side of Edward’s neck and holds it almost tenderly. The calluses formed from the handle of a shovel graze his throat, and he closes his eyes, thinking of softer palms and work-toughened wrists. Hands that could not shake the smell of soap shavings. He imagines, then, what Henry thinks of when he touches his skin. A clean-shaven face, perhaps. Creased cheeks. A deep voice, always with a story to tell.

“You made me leave him,” he breathes.

“Crozier made me bury him,” Henry replies just as softly. They both understand they do not speak of the same man, as they construct an effigy from words. Does it matter?  _ It does,  _ Edward tells himself,  _ he does. _ “Here we are, Edward. The last victims of our own cowardice.”

**Author's Note:**

> find me on [tumblr](http://edward-little.tumblr.com).


End file.
